Understanding by Design

1. Understanding by Design By Mutindi ndunda

2. Curriculum Design and Understanding: The Vignettes • English High School Teacher • The Apple Theme • The Math question—”how many buses does the army need to transport 1,128 soldiers if each bus holds 36 soldiers? • The High School History teacher dilemma What do all these vignettes have in common?

3. What is Backward Design • Students are our primary clients, effectiveness of curriculum, assessment, and instructional designs is ultimately determined by their achievement of desired learnings. • Standards inform and shape our work. • National, state, district, or institutional standards specify what students should know and be able to do. • These standards provide a framework to help us identify teaching and learning priorities and guide our design of curriculum and assessments.

4. Are the Best Curricular Designs “Backwards”? • The “backward design” has proven to be one of the most effective curricular designs • Many teachers begin with textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities rather than deriving those tools from targeted goals or standards. • Backward design advocates for the reverse: One starts with the end—the desired results (goals or standards)—and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform. • Backward design may be thought of as purposeful task analysis.

5. This backward approach to curricular design also departs from another common practice: thinking about assessment as something we do at the end, once teaching is completed. • Backward design calls for us to operationalize our goals or standards in terms of assessment evidence as we begin to plan a unit or course. • Reminds us to begin with the question and evidence that students have attained the desired understanding and proficiencies—before proceeding to plan teaching and learning experiences.

6. The Backward Design Process The logic of backward design suggests a planning sequence for curriculum. This sequence has three stages. Stages in the Backward Design Process Identify Desired Results. Determine Acceptable Evidence. Identify Desired Results.

7. Stage 1: Identify Desired Results • Question: • What should students know, understand, and be able to do? • Examine established content standards (national, state, and district), and review curriculum expectations. • Make choices—Prioritize what is to be covered. Given that there typically is more content than can reasonably be addressed, we are obliged to make choices. • We cannot address all areas; thus the larges ring identifies knowledge. (Pg. 9)

8. Worth being familiar with Important to know and do “Enduring” understanding Establishing Curricular Priorities

9. Prioritizing content—Applying Filters. Filter 1. • Ask your self—questions such as: • To what extent does the idea, topic or process represent a “big idea” having enduring value beyond the classroom? • Enduring understandings go beyond discrete facts or skills to focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes. • They are applicable to new situations within or beyond the subject. The idea is the rule of law. • A big idea also can be described as a linchpin idea. A linchpin is the pin that keeps the wheel in place on an axle. Thus, a linchpin idea is one that is essential for understanding. • A good question to ask is “For any subject taught in primary school, we might ask [is it] worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult.”

10. Filter 2. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process reside at the heart of the discipline? Filter 3. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process require uncoverage? Filter 4. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process offer potential for engaging students?

11. Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence • How will we know if students have achieved the desired results and met the standards? • What will we accept as evidence of student understanding and proficiency? • The backward design approach encourages us to think about a unit or course in terms of the collected assessment evidence needed. • The backward approach encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first think like an assessor before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine whether students have attained the desired understandings.

12. Continuum of Assessment Methods Informal checks for understanding Observation/Dialogue Performance task/project Quiz/Test Academic prompt Misconception Alert: The collected evidence we seek may well include observations and dialogues, traditional quizzes and tests, performance tasks and projects, as well as students’ self assessments gathered over time.

13. Types of Assessment • Quiz and Test Items - • These are simple, content-focused questions • Academic Prompts – • These are open-ended questions or problems that require the student to think critically, not just recall knowledge, and then to prepare a response, product, or performance. • Performance Tasks and Projects – • As complex challenges that mirror the issues and problems faced by adults, they are authentic.

14. Worth being familiar with Important to know and do “Enduring” understanding Curricular Priorities and Assessments • Assessment Types • Traditional quizzes and tests • paper/pencil • selected-response • constructed-response • Performance tasks and projects • open-ended • complex • authentic

15. Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence • This task asks students to demonstrate what I really want them to take away from the unit. • I can now use quizzes to check their prerequisite knowledge of the food groups and food pyramid recommendations, and a test for their understanding of how a nutritionally deficient diet contributes to health problems.

16. Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction • Involves deciding what activities the students will do during the unit and what resources and materials we’ll need for those activities. • Teacher needs to think first about what essential knowledge and skills the students will need to demonstrate the important understandings. • Skills needed include learning how to read and interpret the nutrition fact labels on foods and how to scale a recipe . • materials teacher will use: • Resources collected during the past several years • Invite a nutritionist. • Planning backward is very helpful. The teacher can more clearly specify what knowledge and skills are really essential, given the goals for the unit.

17. The assessments—the performance tasks and related sources of evidence—are designed prior to the lessons. • Revised to better support the desired enduring understandings. • The teaching methods and resource materials are chosen last, mindful of the work that students must produce to meet the standards. What instructional strategies will be most effective at helping us reach our targets • The role of the textbook may shift from the primary resource to a supporting one.

18. The Big Picture of a Design Approach Key Design Question Design Considerations Filters (Design Criteria) What the Final Design Accomplishes National standards. State standards. District standards. Regional topic opportunities. Teacher expertise and interest. Stage 1. What is worthy and requiring of understanding? Enduring ideas. Opportunities for authentic, discipline based work. Uncoverage. Engaging. Unit framed around enduring understandings and essential questions. Stage 2. What is evidence of understanding? Six facets of understanding. Continuum of assessment types. Valid. Reliable. Sufficient. Authentic work. Feasible. Student Friendly. Unit anchored in credible and educationally vital evidence of the desired understandings. Stage 3. What learning experiences and teaching promote understanding, interest, and excellence? Research-based repertoire of learning and teaching strategies. Essential and enabling knowledge and skill. WHERE Where is it going? Hook the students. Explore and equip. Rethink and revise. Exhibit and evaluate. Coherent learning experiences and teaching that will evoke and develop the desired understandings, promote interest, and make excellent performance more likely.

19. What is a Matter of Understandingchapter 2 • Any complex unit of study will involve many targets simultaneously: knowledge, skills, attitudes, habits of mind, and understanding. • Clarify how the goal of understanding differs from other achievement targets, when teaching for understanding is needed, and how to select the important understandings to focus upon.

20. What Should be Uncovered? • The need to understand is heightened when an idea, fact, argument, or experience goes against our expectations or is counterintuitive. • A curriculum designed to develop understanding uncovers complex, abstract, and counterintuitive ideas by involving student in active questioning, practice trying out ideas. • “Uncoverage” describes the design philosophy of guided inquiry into abstract ideas.

21. The Expert-Novice Gap • The students needs to know uncoverage from their point of view not ours. • Educators/teachers must also know the subject well enough to get beyond inert textbook and curriculum framework language • Our designs must help the student see what is worth understanding, what needs further exploration and understanding from the activities and readings. • weaknesses conventional curriculum designs seems to be the in depth focus on a particular theme –there is no enduring learning for the students to derive.

22. Re-Visiting the Vignettes • The world history teacher covers vast amounts of content during the last quarter of the year. • The teacher does not consider what the students will understand and apply from the material. • Even if the course students need to determine what is most important • Need to find out what kind of intellectual scaffolding is provided to guide students through important ideas. • In coverage oriented instruction, the teacher, in effect, merely checks off topics.

23. Critiques with the vignettes designs • The designs does not prioritize important ideas worthy of understanding. • The designs does not foster students’ understanding because it does not encourage them to explore essential questions. • Students have no clear performance targets. They do not know the purpose of activities and lessons or the expected performance requirements. • The necessary evidence of that understanding has occurred as not been established. • Without explicit performance goals or culminating assessments of understanding, teachers do not know which students understand what, and to what level of sophistication. • Ensure understanding by knowing what subject matter needs uncoverage to be understood and learned.

24. Focusing on Priorities • Not everything we ask students to learn must be thoroughly understood. • What knowledge is worth understanding—worth spending time to uncover? • What kind of achievement target is understanding, and how does it differ from the other targets or standards?

25. What Knowledge is Worth Understanding? • . • Enduring. • At the heart of the discipline. • Needing uncoverage. • Potentially engaging. • We cannot go into depth on everything.

26. Filters for Selecting Understandings • Represent a big idea having enduring value beyond the classroom • Reside at the heart of the discipline (involving “doing” the subject. • Require uncoverage (of abstract or often misunderstood ideas). • Offer potential for engaging students. “Enduring” understanding

27. Inadequancies • There is inadequacy of most district, state, and national standards in helping clarify which are the big ideas and how best to uncover them. Either too vague for example, “The student will be proficient in all genres of writing”—or they unhelpfully suggest that didactic teaching and rote learning will be sufficient for learning— “The student will know that there are three branches of government and why.” • Teacher- will need to amplify or sharpen the framing of the content standards into useful matters of understanding if they work in states or districts the provide less specific guidance.

28. What kind of Achievement Target is Understanding, and How does it Differ from Other Targets or Standards? • To understand a topic or subject is to use knowledge and skill in sophisticated, flexible ways. • Knowledge and skill necessary elements of understanding, but they are not synonymous with understanding. • Matters of understanding require more: Students need to make conscious sense and apt use of the knowledge they are learning and the principles underlying it. • Knowing something implies knowing a set of facts, skills,and procedures that need only be internalized.

29. Understanding involves the abstract and conceptual, not merely the concrete and discrete: concepts, generalizations, theories, and mental links between facts. • Understanding involves the ability to use knowledge and skill in context, as opposed to doing something routine and on cue in out-of-context assignments or assessment items.

30. What are Matters of Understanding an Any Achievement Target? • Underneath many straightforward facts is often a complicated and arguable matter of understanding, with a history worth knowing: • Important to ask “What part of the fact might be embedded theory?”

31. Problems for Understanding • Problems for understanding lurk beneath seemingly unproblematic knowledge. • Students continually must be led to recognize the need for uncoverage of knowledge and skill they learn—the need for active inquiry. • A key challenge in teaching for understanding is to make the student’s view of knowledge and coming-to-know more sophisticated by revealing the problems, controversies, and assumptions that lie behind much given and seemingly unproblematic knowledge. • Four criteria serve as filters to select ideas to teach for understanding.

32. Questions: Doorways to Understanding The questions often seemed to serve as criteria for determining where [students] were getting and how well they were understanding. —Bruner, 1973, pp 449 -450 • One key design strategy is to build curriculum around the the questions that gave rise to the content knowledge in the first place, rather than simply teaching students.

33. Organizing the unit around questions such as these would provide teacher and students with a sharper focus and better direction for inquiry. • Questions call for students to make meaning of more carefully selected activities, and they call for teachers to devise assessment tasks related to answering them. • Questions render the unit design more coherent and make the student’s role more appropriately intellectual. • Turn content standards and outcome statements into question form, and then design assignments and assessments that evoke possible answers.

34. Student responses enable us to test our activity and assignment designs to ensure that learning is more than only engaging activity or indiscriminate coverage.

35. Essential and Unit Questions • What types of questions might guide our teaching and engage students in uncovering the important ideas at the heart of each subject? • What is an important question for which the text book provides an answer? • These types of questions cannot be answered satisfactorily in a sentence. • Need to use provocative and multi-layered questions that reveal the richness and complexities of a subject.

36. Essential questions point to the key inquiries and the core ideas of a discipline. • Brunner (1996) suggests that questions of this type :are ones that pose dilemmas, subvert obvious or canonical ‘truths’ or force incongruities upon our attention.”(p.127) --A recurring question that can be used to organize a unit, course, or entire program: • Essential questions can and should be asked over and over.

37. Tips for Using Essential Questions • Make the content the answers to the questions. • Select or design assessment tasks, up front, that are explicitly linked to the questions. • Prioritize content for students to make the work clearly focus on a few key questions. • Edit the questions to make them as engaging and provocative as possible for the particular age group. Frame the questions in “kid language” as appropriate. • Derive and design specific concrete exploratory activities and inquiries for each question. • Post the overarching questions in the classroom, and encourage students to organize notebooks around them to emphasize their importance for study and note taking. • Help students personalize the questions. Encourage them to share examples, personal stories, and hunches, and to bring clippings and artifacts to class to help the questions com alive. • Allot sufficient time for “unpacking” the questions. Be mindful of student age, experience, and other instructional obligations. Use question-concept maps to show relatedness of questions. • Share your questions with other facult to make planning and teaching for cross-subject matter coherence more likely

38. Essential questions characterized by what they do • Go to the heart of a discipline. • Recur naturally throughout one’s learning the field. • Answers become increasingly sophisticated. • Raise other important questions

39. The questions should be framed for maximal simplicity; be worded in student-friendly language; provoke discussion and questions; and point toward the larger essential and unit questions. • Entry-point questions provide a focus for all the work and knowledge of mastery. • Example with nutrition unit—the question, what is healthy eating gets at the essence of what I want my students to take away—the enduring understanding. • or What is wellness?

40. Putting It All Together: A Design Template Form and Function: The Understanding by Design template provides a format in which all the design elements come together to enable the designer and others to take stock. The first page (Figure 11.1) asks designers to consider what they want students to understand and then to frame those understandings in terms of questions. Users are prompted to identify overarching understandings and essential questions to establish a larger context into which a particular unit is nested. “What does it mean to live a healthy life?” and, “What is wellness’”